 Well, hello, Justin, Robert Young will be along shortly video viewers. I should control Roger Chang. Thank you. I'm the talking website. Turns out Justin was out for a little walk. Taking his new back that he just got installed out for a spin. Walking and talking. He lost a pack of time, spun around and started hofing it back. He's walked all the way to Los Angeles from Oakland. Is that what the Jesuits did? Is that what they did? Yeah, to make all the missions. I mean, granted, they would, you know, it took. They took longer than Justin needs to take, but clean install. Yeah, fresh install of his back. Yeah. Well, hello, big Jim. Sup. No, no, no, just be here any minute now, right now. Wouldn't that be great if he popped in right when you said that? And was that your gamble? I mean, now, now, also now and now. Three to one now. Netflix snags, deaf comedy jam, 25th anniversary special. Wow, it's been around for 25 years. GameStop quarterly revenue rises 3.4%. All right, I'm curious why. So more crap. I bet you that it wasn't in video game sales. Net income fell to twenty two point two million. So net sales rose to one point six nine million. Basically, they made more profit, even though they brought in less money. However, they made more sales. Yeah, there's not much else here. That's all they got. So I noticed, at least from the game stops around me, that they're sending a lot more selling, a lot more like for those dolls, those little action figures that look very generic. Big Jim thinks it's selling off stores. They should they have way, way too many places and they're right on top of each other. Also, all game stops need to like shampoo their carpets or something. They all smell the same, like like a gym or something. When's the last time you were actually in a game stop yesterday? No day before yesterday. Oh, really? Wow. That's way more recent than me. Last time I was in one was probably more than a year. I always go because I'm always curious that the bargain bin, I'm a cheapskate to one, excuse me, I went to one in this mall near us, I want to say probably about a year ago is last last fall. So maybe maybe nine to ten months. It was also next to all the Filipino stores I was at yesterday. So he brings bacon's like, are we keeping you up? No, I just haven't had enough of your delightful coffee, Zoe, but I'll be solving that shortly. Exactly. I just need a swig of that coffee. But doesn't he have more caffeine? Typically in a cup or no. That's not the point. No, I'm just wondering why people don't like with a cup of tea, give you as much of a perk as a cup of coffee depends on the tea. But yeah, it's all about taste. Yo, Red Bull has more caffeine than both of them. Hey, Justin, Robert Young. Oh, my God, I am so sorry. Taking back years up for a spin, huh? I got lost in the in the the marigolds there. The fact that full functioning use of both of my lower extremities. Yeah, man, I don't play via me into a cloud that I only in terror realized that I would go far away from my house. I am so sorry. No harm done. We are well prepped, as you know. So I'm good whenever you're good. Just give me the sign. Once you go ahead, let's go right into it. All right, let's do it then. Here we go, ladies. Oh, I forgot to change that. Hold on one moment, please. Your listening is very important to us here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by you to find out more. Head to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 24th, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt, Justin Robert Young along side as well as our producer, Roger Chang. How the hell are you gentlemen? You know, normally I do my best to offer a few platitudes or maybe some witticisms up here at the top of the show. But I have to say I have just today gotten a cortisone shot in my back that has been aching me for weeks and weeks and weeks now. And I am I am on cloud nine. You are a new man. That's amazing and exuberant and excited. Justin Robert Young right now. You know what's funny is I was supposed to get a cortisone shot in my hip today, but I didn't. We would have been cortisone shot brothers. Quite a bit. All I'm going to say, highly recommended. If you have the money, I highly recommend it. Roger, did you have any cortisone shots or anything today? No, I did a two and a half mile walk today and nothing hurts yet. I'm sure it will tonight. I actually had a nice long walk this morning as well to a very productive coffee meeting. But let's start with a few tech things you should know. Evan Blass, a.k.a. Evleaks posted that Google's new Pixel phones will be announced October 5th and come with Snapdragon 836 processors. Now, Google has not itself made any of these announcements, but Evan Blass has a good track record of finding out this stuff ahead of time. You know, I saw a thing on the NBC Nightly News yesterday, mostly because my buddy Steve Kovac was in it, about how the smart phone wars are reignited because of the new Samsung phone with there is a new iPhone coming out. But even with the Pixel, which I'm sure is going to be an amazing device with Oreo on it, it doesn't feel like there are wars anymore. There's just a lot of options. There are no more bezels. We're bezel free. Doesn't that excite you? Well, it's just, we have, it's like, oh no, will Exxon knock out shell? Like no, there's always going to be places where we can get serviced to our needs. Yeah, fair enough. Chief judge Robert Moran, the district court of Columbia Superior Court ordered Dreamhost to turn over data about visitors to a protest site requested by the US Department of Justice. The judge said he would supervise the data to make sure it was limited to suspects of a riot. Oh, this is Dreamhost winning on one hand, as we talked about previously. They've gotten the request narrowed. They wanted to appeal this decision. And the judge said, no, you can't. So they have to hand over the data, but the judge wants to make sure it's just the data for the people who are under suspicion of crimes and nobody else. So I feel like this is a good result, to be honest. You know, it is good, but allow me to be Mr. Slippery Slope. This needs to be in the open. If the government is going to be getting this kind of information and we need to know what information they are getting as fast and as complete as possible. Yeah, and the warrant should state that. I think that's why the judge is supervising this because he's like, you guys are a little loose in your warrant language there, so I'm gonna supervise this whole thing. New York Times' Brian X. Chen has sources who say Apple will sell a new flagship iPhone for $999 when it arrives later this year. Chen sources also say the phone will have wireless charging and facial recognition. We've heard those rumors from other people as well. The base iPhone 7 as a comparison costs $649, but the most expensive iPhone you can get, which would be the iPhone 7 plus with 128 gigabytes, is $969. So if this $999 price stays, it would be $30 more than the most expensive iPhone you could previously buy. Tom, I just have this wave of deja vu, this wave that I have heard this story before, that the new as yet unconfirmed Apple device that everybody kind of knows is confirmed will be $100,000. No, it's never that crazy, but it's always expensive, right? Yeah, will be an insane amount of money, and now all of a sudden there'll be a rush to defend why it'll be worth $999. Then they're gonna debut it, and there will be a model for $999, but it won't be the lowest model, and Apple will get credit for being cheaper than what we had initially expected. I would not be blown away is all I'm saying. If there still is a $650 to $700 option on the new iPhone when it debuts, and there is the model they wanna push everybody to, which is the $999 model. There are leaks, and there are leaks, correct? Yeah. I don't talk about leaks that come from blogs that don't have a good track record or come from places we have no track record on, because who knows if those are true? We will occasionally talk about somebody like Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg or Ming-Chi Kuo because they have a good track record, and a lot of times what they're doing is cultivating supply chain sources. People who aren't authorized by Apple. This strikes me because Brian X. Chen says people briefed on the product as either supply chain people or possibly consultants or retail partners or telcos that Apple probably trusts not to leak these things unless Apple's okay with it being leaked, and when it shows up in places like the New York Times, a lot of times it's a leak that's on purpose. So there are leaks and there are leaks. I'm not saying this one is on purpose, but this could definitely be the kind of leak where Apple winks and says we'll turn a blind eye because we want to get people used to this price point before we announce it, so that even if we announce it at that price point, they've had a while to get used to it, or we can undercut it. Yeah, I believe that this comes from a good place. I think that the reporting on this is likely sound. I think that there would be a $999 iPhone. I don't know for sure if that will be the floor is all I would call it. This could be the 128 gig, and the base one could be 699. Exactly, yeah. Meanwhile, sources tell Bloomberg that HTC is considering selling its Vive VR business or possibly the company as a whole. A strategic advisor has been brought in. A full sale is considered unlikely and HTC may not decide to make any sales. HTC was founded in 1997 and began making Windows phones in 1992. It made its first Android phone in 2008, or the first Android phone in 2008. Tom, answer me this. Is this story more about HTC or is it more about the Vive? It's more about HTC. A lot of people are gonna look at this as a problem with VR because VR has a lot of legitimate questions around it, but I would say this is almost a vote of confidence in VR if HTC is considering strategic moves, that means they need to sell. That's what this is always code for is we brought in a strategic advisor. Now, they haven't admitted this publicly yet, so it is early days, but it says we're in trouble and we need to figure out what to do about it. And a lot of times when companies are in trouble like that, they take what they think is a very valuable part of their business and they sell it off. Now, you can make the argument that companies also try to sell off parts of their business that are currently valuable that they don't have confidence are going to continue to be valuable and that would be bad news for VR. So you could spin it either way. I don't think this is damning for VR. I don't even think it's damning for the Vive. If anything, it says we're worried about our future as a company and we can't put the resources into this that we think we need. So if I was gonna make a prediction based on this little shred of knowledge, it would be VR in HTC's estimation is gonna take a little longer to catch on than they thought. So they're looking at whether it makes sense to sell it off. You know, this is a long-term play and they might be leaving tomorrow. So let's see what we can get for it. The only question that I would have on this and boy, howdy does this come from a Vive devotee and fanboy, I still believe that they have the best hands down VR experience without question with their room sensing motion tracking technology. But I think that that technology was more valuable a year ago. Now that you've got companies like Google and Apple that are putting a ton of money into their own research and you realize more and more that the future of this is going to be without light boxes like what Vive has now, you better hope that in Vive's, in HTC's AR or sorry, just the development that they've got something that is its own collective device because that's what's going to sell to a Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, another company that really wants to make a splash in this space because if all they've got is what they have now it's still the best right now. I don't know how long it's gonna be the best. Well, and that ties into what I'm talking about where their research department may be saying, look, we've got the next thing and it's a good next thing but we need money to get it off the ground and HTC is having so many problems in other parts of its business that it's trying to decide how to fund that. Which case I would look not at a Facebook not at a Microsoft. They have already got their own plans. I wouldn't even look at a Google necessarily. I'd look at a Baidu. I would look at a Tencent because HTC is a Taiwanese company and those are companies who also have their own VR divisions but would benefit I think a little more at the leapfrog that this would give them. Do you think that they're like, all right, would you like to buy the Vive business? Yes. And then like a movie theater concession stand. Would you like to buy the whole company for only 25 cents more? What do you think? Would you like to upgrade? Would you like to power? Would you like to supersize your VR? True all of us, please. Big Jim says maybe Amazon would be interested. Well, Amazon is interested in buying things, obviously. Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods will close Monday, August 28th. That's this Monday. Amazon says customers will immediately see lower prices on a selection of its best selling staples across Whole Foods stores and Amazon Prime will become the Whole Foods customer rewards program. It'll be integrated into the point of sale and eventually not on day one but eventually Amazon Prime members will get quote special savings and in-store benefits at Whole Foods. I am so excited. You must be joking. This is very happy for me. I am an Amazon Prime member. I shopped the Whole Foods in Oakland is literally right down around the corner from where I live. It is the place where we shop the most often. Let me ask you this. And this is a little outside of the tech world but things are blending with Amazon moving into this field is a lower cost, more competitive Whole Foods, let's say a little bit closer to Trader Joe's prices than the Apple store, right? That feels like a game changer to me. Like the fact that Amazon's leading with this news is exactly what you would want to hear because the biggest thing that people bitch about Whole Food is that it really should be called whole paycheck. Yeah. And Amazon is known as the place to do price comparison shopping, right? So, I mean, for good or ill that a lot of people think of it that way. So, why not say, yeah, you're one major problem with Whole Foods, what's gonna get better on day one for everyone, which even when they say select staples, I know exactly what they mean. They mean the in-house brand, the Whole Foods brand. Well, they listed them, right? And the big headline, avocados. Avocados gonna be cheaper down. You can afford healthcare finally. Oh, yes. Yeah, this is the right press move for Amazon. And I think it kind of gets people's mind off of the other part of this, which is how is this going to fit into delivery? How is this going to play into Amazon's other retail strategy with bookstores, possibly electronic stores? Yeah. Is there gonna be any rebranding? But Scott Johnson nailed it on yesterday's show. He's like, what if you as an Amazon Prime member get a discount when you walk up to Whole Foods? It could also be an entree into an Amazon mobile payments system. Whole Foods is one of the places that supports Apple Pay. You know Amazon wants to link that right through your Amazon Pay system. So I'm curious, especially because Amazon has deprecated some of their payment systems in the past, whether they partner with an Apple Pay or an Android Pay or both, and tie it into your Amazon account, or we see some other approach from them. Certainly all those. Let's look at what they do right now though. If you have Prime Now and areas that Prime Now exists, you can shop at Sprouts, for example, which is right in my neighborhood, but you have to pay $40. The order has to be $40 for them to go out and deliver it. Right now Whole Foods has partnerships with companies like Instacart in areas where they exist. They also are promoting the idea that you can come and pick up your foods. So here's what Amazon can do, maybe not day one, but certainly in year one. All of a sudden, congratulations. Now Prime Now and Amazon Fresh are either a combined kind of service or two different services that both feed out of Whole Foods, and now not only do they have what's in their warehouse, they've got what's in the Whole Foods area that they can go and pick up for you. And on Prime Now, you don't need $40 because now we own it and we're close enough and we can have people there to go take it. The other thing is Amazon is great, maybe best in the world at displaying items that you would like to put in your cart. It is a science for which they've been perfecting since they're very, very earliest days. Even if it's just, forget shopping. Even if it's just shop online, come pick it up. Nobody can do it better than Amazon can right now. Trust me, Instacart's version of CLT Mile 6 just went into activation because they have a contract with Whole Foods that I'm sure Amazon will try to figure out if they can get out of or not. But once it's over in a year or two, Instacart will want to have a replacement or they will go away because Whole Foods is a large part of their business right now. So Instacart is out there meeting with Kroger and all the others about, hey, you guys are Amazon's gunning for you, let's help each other out. Problem is though any deal that they're gonna make is gonna be priced on top of the package. And what I suspect Amazon is going to do is say, guess what? All you gotta do is be a prime member and maybe spend $30. In fact, it's free. If you come pick it up, it's $30 we can deliver it to you. And maybe it's a little bit more and or pay a little on top and we'll deliver it immediately. Well, and don't forget, Amazon has an entire logistical chain at their back that involves cargo ships and planes. Wait until they start combining that Whole Foods predilection for high quality items with a, hey, you want a main lobster that was in the ocean this morning delivered to your door? No problem. Yeah. We got you. Wow. India Supreme Court rules that citizens have a right to privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution, which protects life and liberty. The decision opens the way for further cases against the AdHAR identity program, which the government has made mandatory to access some benefits like welfare. Now, Tom, for people who are not familiar with AdHAR, what is AdHAR and what kind of information does it take? Yeah. I'm not up to speed on AdHAR as much as you folks in India. So we'd love to hear from folks who know about this in our audience, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. But from my understanding, it's the government ID program that has been at first supposed to be voluntary, but they've been making it required for more and more things. And it has a lot of biometric information like fingerprints involved in it. There's a lot of questions about the security of the database in which it's stored. And there's even more questions about the right to not participate in it if you want to. This is a huge case in India. Forget technology, just on the right of privacy itself for the Supreme Court, which kind of overruled previous decisions in this to say, no, there is a right to privacy in the Constitution. And so AdHAR has to respect that. It also can have some negative impacts on Indian technologies because a lot of technology companies in India were banking on the fact that, well, everybody's gonna need these biometrics. We're gonna have the ability to use the government's database so we can provide all these services. Well, now if people don't have to participate in AdHAR the way they did before, that could be bad for a lot of startups. So on the tech side, if we're gonna draw a circle around the tech question, the fact that there is a government database of this sort of data makes it right for companies to come in with the sweetest of deals, which are government contracts, right? Because they are very often times above market value and exclusive for longer periods of time. There is a tremendous benefit for them if this exists, there is less of a benefit if this database stops. Do I have that correct? Well, let's say it again. That these companies that can be government contractors for India, if they have these databases, so the Indian government can do whatever they want with it, if this database becomes restricted or less interesting than it was before and less relevant because the data stops coming in at the same rate, that is worrisome not only for the government, but also for these companies. Yeah, and it's not even just government contractors. There were other companies who were going to partner, which I guess makes them a government contractor of a sort, but they weren't going to provide a service directly to the government necessarily. They were going to use the government database to provide other services, but whether that's the case or not, the government was gonna sell the database to these other companies. Yeah, it was going to leverage that use for other services again, on all on the premise that this was voluntary, but they made it mandatory for filing tax returns, for opening bank accounts, for securing loans, for buying and selling property, even making purchases more than 50,000 rupees, which is about 780 bucks. So, yeah, this is something where this decision now rips out a lot of that security that companies had and gives the security back to people who want to protect their privacy. Interesting. A New York judge issued a summary judgment that Ethan and Hila Klein of the YouTube channel H3H3 did not violate the copyright of Matt Haas when they featured clips in a video critical of Haas. Judge Catherine B. Forrest made the decision, determining that Klein's use of the clips included critical commentary and did not constitute a market substitute for the Haas video. Those are two conditions of a fair use of copyrighted material. So to be clear, they're found to be infringing his copyright, but they made a fair use of that copyright, and so they don't have to pay a penalty on it. The judge noted that just because she ruled this was a fair use, does not mean that every reaction video ever made is going to be considered fair use. She says some of those reaction videos out there are akin to a group viewing session without commentary, and so those wouldn't be. It's a case-by-case basis. She didn't want to set a precedent. The judge also ruled that the Klein's critical comments were non-actionable opinions, or if not non-actionable opinions, they were true as a matter of law and therefore not defamation, because Haas had gone after them both on the copyright side and on the defamation side, and they won on both. This is a big deal for YouTube creators. It's a big deal for any kind of creator, including yourself, anybody out there who makes anything on the internet that says someone shouldn't be able to use copyright law to shut you up if they don't like what you're saying about them, as long as what you're saying is a valid opinion and you're not undermining the market for their work directly by replicating it. You are 150% correct on this. What I have always thought when it comes to fair use or defamation, something that I had drilled into me when I was a journalist for libel law, just slightly different in terms of the subtleties when it comes to newspapers, which is what I mostly got my very basic education in. These things are never promised. No matter how much you do your best to follow the guidelines, the way I always like to think of it is all you are doing by following the guidelines that have been set before are filling up one of those lottery, those Powerball lottery jars with your colored balls, and there will always be a few of the other side. And depending on how everything turns out, you will likely win, but nothing is ever promised. So it is very, very good to see what seems to be, to me at least, to my eyes, a caustic and critical yet within the letter of fair use law, not only for fair use, but also for defamation be held up in the court. And as much as the judge wanted to make clear that not all reaction videos would fall under this decision, let's look at the dogs that don't bark and say, this kind of reaction video is covered by it. So you can look at what they did and the steps that they took. And again, nothing's ever promised, but at least you have some kind of recent legal statement that says if I do these things, I should not be in trouble. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. You can get it as a podcast, as an Amazon Echo flash briefing on the Google Home and as an anchor update at the Anchor app, which you can find in your local app store. All right, you may have noticed we didn't talk about Facebook's Andrew Bosworth taking over consumer hardware at Facebook. That will include Oculus and projects in Facebook's research area, Building 8. That's because we want to talk about it in our main discussion here. Bosworth worked closely on the news feed back in the day. He's been a loyal confidant of Mark Zuckerberg since the early days. And most recently, for about five years now, has been the company's VP of ads and business. Again, a very important part of the Facebook business. Now, he will be heading products. Recent leaks purport to show that Facebook is developing a number of hardware products. There's a video chat device, supposedly codenamed Aloha, a smart speaker and a necklace embedded with sensors. Those are all described in the Business Insider report. VP of VR Hugo Barra and the head of research, Regina Dugan, both formerly Google employees, by the way, will report to Bosworth. And Justin, this is an attempt on Facebook's part to turn hardware into a going concern into a profitable business and say, yes, we'd like to make moonshot type hardware, but we wanna ship it and we wanna sell it. The big question is, can they do it? Because that is a lot easier to say than it is to do. If a company can do it, it is Facebook. It is interesting that this is the route they are going, as opposed to acquiring a company, which seems to have been the way that they have moved forward into verticals that they are not skilled in previously. However, it seems like they got a lot of talent here, but I wanna focus on the Aloha, which seems to be, according to the Business Insider description, a competitor to the Amazon Echo Show, which is the video screen Amazon Echo. Now, two questions. One, we don't need to answer, which doesn't seem like the Amazon Echo Show is setting the world on fire. So it's kind of a question on why they wanna enter in and compete with that. But the other thing is, apparently, according to this Business Insider article, they are having a problem with the perception that Facebook is not trustworthy with their data. This is in their own market research as reported by Business Insider, to the point where they have thought very heavily about exactly how they want to market it and whether or not they want to spin out their hardware company fully, so it is not Facebook's new device, it is Building 8's new device. Yeah. I don't know if the Amazon Echo Show is selling well or not. All I can say is, here it has changed how we use it. My wife refused to talk to the Amazon Echo until it got a screen. Really? So it may have the potential to finally catch on for a lot of people, but I do know that if I'm reading this Business Insider story right, Aloha was in development before the Echo Show arrived on the scene and Facebook may be feeling a little bit lapped by Amazon right now that they thought, ah, we're gonna show them their little trash can of an Amazon Echo. Ours will have a large touchscreen, like a laptop size touchscreen and facial recognition. Now, Amazon Echo Show doesn't have that big of a screen or facial recognition, but now I don't know if I need those sorts of things. And the facial recognition goes right to the heart of what you're talking about. People don't trust Facebook or Google for that matter. I don't need to pick just on Facebook. They don't trust the companies that are tracking them and they know Google and Facebook are tracking them because of advertisements. Now, Facebook and Google do a lot to say, hey, we are tracking you, but we'll let you know, we'll let you opt out, we'll let you control your privacy, we have transparency dashboards. That doesn't change the perception. Amazon also tracks you, but Amazon isn't an advertiser. It's a consumer of advertisement space. It will advertise to you. It doesn't sell the advertisements to others to give to you. And so they just don't have as much of a perception. Now, with that, Amazon is constantly being accused by people of spying on them with the Amazon Echo. And people say, I keep the mic muted. I don't put it in rooms. I don't want to one of those in my house. If Amazon's suffering, that Facebook's gonna suffer it way more. And that's a problem when all the good new hardware needs to have not only connectivity, but the ability to anticipate your needs, which means learning about you. So you have identified the idea that there is a baseline paranoia about always on microphones. And I think that that will be here until we have a consumer level way that I can cap what like that this Amazon Echo or whatever device can learn by itself, right? With anonymized data. And I can have assurances via some sort of device that I install on my end that- And Apple talks about doing all of that on the device so that they don't have to know anything about you. There's all these ways. Yeah, so let's get back to the heart of what you were saying before. The difference between Google and Facebook and Amazon with the line being between Google and Facebook and Amazon on the other end. Now I'm gonna start a little wide and I'm gonna work my way back in. There is an unquestionable trend that people know more and care more about Silicon Valley companies than they ever have in their life. Regularly, sometimes we cover it on this show, sometimes we don't. There are stories now almost weekly about internal memos, about reflections of character within the company, whether or not there's a toxic atmosphere that is there. It ousted a CEO of the fastest growing company that we have ever seen in Uber, right? With that, with the idea for every Don't Be Evil Google Doodle where they show that they are a company that cares about the world, consumers also know that they are the biggest seller of advertising and Facebook is right behind them. And so the question is, and there's a reason why that Google Home Beauty and the Beast Story blew up the way it did because the question is, if I go out and I spend hundreds of dollars on this device, and maybe I buy two because I have such a big house and I love it so much, in two years is this just gonna turn in to a funnel for advertising? Am I gonna wind up? Are they gonna help themselves to double dip? And am I just gonna be the frog in the parable with the scorpion when I'm getting seven ads before I can order something online because it is just their nature as ad sales companies to shove ads in front of my face? I'll tell you what, it's not gonna matter. That's my thought. It should, you should worry about it, you should think about it and companies like Apple are going to make a big deal out of it because they wanna sell you their version and they don't sell ads or offer the world's largest online retailer. Yep, but if nobody's worried about Amazon and when I say nobody, I don't mean you, GPEG in the chat room or anybody else. Of course you guys are worried, but if Amazon is able to sell as many echoes as they have, given the fact that people already are like, you just wanna sell me Amazon stuff, I don't know that it's gonna matter much if Facebook, which gets two billion people to use its online social network despite all the misgivings about how much it tracks you, I don't think they're gonna have a problem. Here's my answer to that though. People get excited when they can get one of these Amazon scan buttons for free. They get excited when they can get a little button they can keep under their washing machine stuff, their dryer sheets that they can just hit a button and order more. They are excited to streamline the way that they buy things and they are happy to do it through Amazon. If it saves them money, saves them time and is more convenient, people rage when an ad is shoved in a place where it wasn't shoved before. They get frustrated when an ad shows up in their news feed that was not before. They keep seeing the same ad over and over and over again because the algorithm says they definitely need to know that Marvel on ice is coming to their town tomorrow. I do think it matters and I do think that it is something that will turn people off. I mean, Google had to backtrack off that beauty and the beast thing real quick, but how many people complain about seeing ads on Facebook? I mean, people did and people still- And Facebook is a master at dealing with that now. They fumbled the first few times back in 2010 and 2012, but they have become masterful at dealing with that kind of reaction. If anybody's ready for this, it's Facebook, not Google. I agree. I think that if somebody is going to fix it, it will be Facebook and not Google because Facebook seems to have a slight more touch on the pulse of humanity and the consumer. They're gonna market this thing about talking to grandma and grandpa and facial recognition that helps grandma and grandpa know exactly who's about to talk to them. And that's what Facebook is all about, keeping in touch with family and friends and they're not gonna put a single ad on it for the first five years that it's out. I would push back on the idea that I think the grandma and grandpa angle, which by the way, we're not making up. This is part of the business insider article. I don't think that that is the smartest way to handle things, but hey, look, they're gonna figure it out. And here's what my prediction is. I think we are gonna get section eight hardware. I think that this is not going to be called, this is not going to be called Facebook. They would rather- Well, section eight would be crazy. I think you mean building eight. Building eight. No, I mean section eight with all these- You're gonna be off the hook, crazy hardware. No, I think that we are going to see- I think that's probably- No, it's not, sorry. Yeah. I think that we are gonna see a spin off because Facebook has had, that's the playbook, is cool new startups doing a thing. And now we're partnering with Facebook that makes it even better. I mean- And then let Facebook be the bad guy, like they are with Instagram. If I have a camera that is showing pictures and video to my friends and family, it should be Instagram branded. Maybe. Yeah. Or something brand new, like you say. Yeah. I don't know. IG might be a little too hip for it. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at Daily Tech News Show at reddit.com and join in our Facebook group. There's folks in there chatting with each other, sharing stories. It's just a place to talk to each other at facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. Real quickly, I'm doing another podcast. It's a limited run series called After On with Rob Reed and it's centered around his book After Now on this week's episode just came out. It features an interview with Andy Hessell about synthetic biology. That's making DNA from scratch, like making up living things. There's all kinds of good info on the state of DNA sequencing, owning your own genetic code, and of course, creating life, the possibility of that. Rob Reed and I discuss how synthetic biology plays out in his novel After On and how it might play out in reality for us. So if you wanna check that out, it's at after-on.com. Episode four just came out. All right, real quickly, couple of emails before we're out of here. Martin from Sunny Sussex wanted to point out that in the UK, the two biggest cinema chains have their own subscription services. Cineworld Unlimited has been going for a long time and their competitor, Odeon, more recently started its Limitless Card. They work a little different than MoviePass, but it points out that maybe AMC's problem with MoviePass is that AMC would like to develop this for themselves. And then Stefan needs some help. Stefan wrote in and said, I need the advice of one of the experts you have on as a co-host or maybe somebody in the audience. A cousin of mine has a medical condition where he has no control over his muscles the way normal people do. It's due to an incorrect procedure during his birth, so his brain is fine, but the lower brainstem was damaged. This makes him spasm and unable to talk. His parents have learned how to communicate with him to get his basic needs met. What I would like to do for them is allow him to do a bit more, such as turn on music, maybe basic word-based communication through a computer. His spasms and twitches make using eye-tracking interfaces useless, and there's no keyboards that'll work either. I was thinking that a brain computer interface, like the ones we see on the market these days that allow you to control a game or basic computer functions would be ideal. Problem is, I've tried contacting two companies and get nothing back. I was wondering if you knew someone or some people I could talk to that might be able to shed light on what choices I have here. He's in South Africa. I even thought I'd just building it myself, but since I work, there's not much time available during the day to get that done properly. So if you work in brain computer interfaces, or if you know a little bit of research and point them in the right direction, send it to us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and we will pass that along to Stefan. So what is the way in which Hawking runs his keyboard? Is that- That is the eye-tracking that he said will not work in this particular- That is eye-tracking. That's not, okay. Yeah, well, I don't know if it's eye-tracking. You know, I say eye-tracking, but he moves his face and I think he may have a thing in his mouth too that he can use. Okay, okay. Yeah, I thought it was some sort of breath thing, but- Thank you, Justin, Robert Young, as always. What you got going on? Oh, man. Well, I'll tell you what, everybody can go ahead and check out my politics podcast. Politics, politics, politics. Oh, wait, hold on, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on before you immediately stop listening and you're like, I hate politics. Get ready, okay? This is something that I've worked on for a very long time. We ran it through the election. People demanded that we keep it going and I'm really, really, really proud of the audience. A, that they kept me doing it and B, that they have continued to bring us new amazing ways of thinking. Let me just say the last episode that we did comes out every Friday, or sorry, Wednesday. The last episode that we did had some of the most amazing emails that I have ever received, including one from a, somebody who works on the anti-ballistic missile effort that the United States is working on to deal with North Korea's nuclear threats. They, he explained why North Korea is such a very specific troublesome military target for the United States in a way that I had never heard from anywhere else. And a couple of weeks ago when Donald Trump first announced his ban on transgender people in the military, I put out the open call for people who have been in that situation, active duty military, transgender people who have served in the past. And I thought that we got some of, again, the most thoughtful, reasoned, informed opinions on this topic. If thoughtful, reasoned, and informed is something that you don't often think of when you think of political coverage, then I encourage you to come listen to Politics Politics Politics. I am not trying to tell you how to think. I am just asking you to think with me as we deal with what we can all agree are unprecedented and very oftentimes confusing and fast-moving times. Thanks to everybody who gives a little value back to this show for the value they get from it. We are at one more patron than we had last month. Hopefully we can keep it there. But thank you to everybody who's supporting the show. And if you've been thinking about supporting the show help us get up a little padding there at patreon.com slash DTNS. It only cost you five cents a show, a dollar a month. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC at outthingeekradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And our website is dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Shannon Morse and Leland Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. A long one, but a good one. Yeah, good show. Good show. What should we call it? Call it Amazon eats whole foods. It does. It did. It is on Monday. Prime paycheck. Facebook echoes Amazon show. Phones without borders. Amazon is hungry for whole foods. Avocados are going to be cheaper. It's probably a pricing based on season. Colored lottery balls. Interesting. Zoe brings the Queen's English spelling to color. Rage against the ad machine. Oh, hold on. Catch it up here. My brain can't follow you that fast. Facebook echoes Amazon's show. It's pretty damn clever. That's amazing. That's good. I feel like that. That's a knockout right there. Shit, shit, shit. What's happening? That's the I enjoy this headline music. Oh, my God. What was that? Autoplay ads, man. I try not to be ad blocker guy. Like I got too many friends that work at a lot of these sites. And I like their I like that I like the day of livelihoods for as long as they have them. But holy crap, these auto plays with those are the worst. I could deal with the pop ups, but the autoplay videos are a pain. I took us. Yeah, you know, I use Privacy Badger because it to me is ethically good because all it's saying is you should have control of what information gets shared. It's not trying to block ads. It only blocks things that track you across sites without your permission. And then it lets you give that permission by saying, oh, no, this is okay. I'm okay with this site dragging me. And then you're no longer blocking the ads. And the nice thing is it stops a lot of sites from auto playing you, especially sites that you don't frequent very often. I just take my phone. The what the word is on these on these avocados because this was the biggest thing in my timeline here. Everyone talking about avocado seed. I feel like that's I mean, was that in the press release? I believe so. I didn't see that. I didn't want to challenge you on it because I honestly hadn't memorized it or anything. But I don't remember seeing it. And maybe maybe people are just freaking out about it. Well, it strikes me as the kind of, no, here we go. Starting Monday, whole food market will offer lower prices on a selection of best selling staples. Stop with the breaking news. I don't have making news, CNBC. You guys can't hear this. Sorry, I feel like a crazy person. All right, I got auto played. All right, customers will enjoy lower prices on products like whole trade, bananas, organic avocados, organic large brown eggs, organic responsibly farmed salmon tilapia, organic baby kale and baby lettuce, animal welfare rated 85% lean ground beef, creamy and crunchy almond butter, organic gala and Fuji apples, organic rotisserie chicken, 365 everyday value organic butter and much more. So here's what they did. Number one, every single one of these things are at least thought to be healthy, right? Yeah, you should try to protect the idea. You should get wild cut salmon. I know it's not a sustainable, but it has better Omega-3s, just saying. Go ahead, it's what they feed them. So they are trying to say, hey, look, this is going to be good stuff for you that you can now buy cheaper. The other side of this is they did not say, you will get more value on 365 everyday value brand. That's true. Black and black, right? So they're saying we're not just gonna come in, we're not gonna be Walmart and just immediately discount the crap out of our house brand. And then because we're Amazon, lean on these other companies. We're just gonna lean on everybody because we're Amazon. Can you imagine the rewards points if they decide to go into that, that you could leverage throughout anything attached to Amazon Prime? You know, I almost wonder, because they don't have a reward system now, right? That's exactly, like they don't have one now, but can you imagine if they decide, like it would literally bury everyone else who does like, sorry. I think all of us. Burry everyone else like Vons does this one with Chevrons so you can get gas cheaper. Here's what they say, in the future, after certain technical integration work is complete, Amazon Prime will become Whole Foods Market's customer rewards program, providing Prime members with special savings and in-store benefits. So it looks like they might not be a points system, but it will be a, are you an Amazon Prime member at checkout? It's like the Ralph's card or the Safeway card or the Kroger card, whatever it is when you are. If it applies to everything under the Amazon sun, like, oh, hey, you spend so much on groceries, your next movie is free or, you know, whatever. Like, how much more compelling would that be to shop at Whole Foods versus a Ralph's or Vons? Listen, if they lower the prices, they become more competitive with the prices. This is a game changer in the growth zone. Well, you know, and the thing is, there is a small subset, not huge, but a significant one of products that both Trader Joe's and Whole Foods carry and Trader Joe's is typically 10 to 15 to 20% cheaper. So it's not, I mean, it's totally easy for them to do it and not kill themselves. And the only thing Trader Joe's will have on him is hella booze. But look at this. All right, so here, Whole Foods market healthy and high quality private label products, including 365 everyday value, whole market market, whole pause and whole catch will be available through amazon.com with Amazon Fresh, Prime Pantry and Prime Now. So maybe, yeah, of course, they're looking at every Whole Foods store. Yeah. Where it's like, we're not necessarily gonna push these things like, you know, Sam's choice does at Walmart and just make that the thing that you definitely wanna buy and secretly make our suppliers make the product so we can slap our own label on it because we're a Walmart do something. Well, that's what everybody does with those brands. I mean, the Whole Foods is no different there. Yeah, but what they're saying is, okay, we'll still have them here. They'll still be competitive price at Whole Foods, but now we wanna just produce more of it and sell more of it in volume on our delivery services. Yeah, they're integrating Whole Foods warehousing system into the Amazon warehousing system. Tell you what, man, this is a... I mean, if you can make the supply line that much more efficient, I mean, you could, hmm. If they disrupt the supermarket industry, this is the death star blowing up Alderaan. Like this would be the demonstration that Amazon, all those, ah, you're not taking enough profit. You're reinvesting too much. They built a effing world destroyer. Well, like if they can do straight from farm to fork, like the entire, not just the warehousing and the buying, but they can say like to a farmer, hey, you know what, we've got like 33,000 Amazon people who specifically want your type of zucchini or whatever. And the farmer can grow that much to meet the allotment, but then instead of just growing more that may or may not see sale, they can do that with other products as the other produce that they can grow simultaneously. I mean, it would make it a lot more... You're just saying that Amazon and Whole Foods combined have more purchasing power. Yeah, well, no, not just purchasing power, but the ability for a more, like, so one of the big things with wholesale produce purchasing is a lot of it just, is the prices can go up and down depending on demand. If you can kind of anticipate the main thing. In other words, less wastage because you have more outlets to sell the stuff. Not just more outlets, but you can predict the outlets ahead of time, right? If you can get customers... Oh, you think because Amazon will have better data mining? They'll have better data mining, but they can ask you as a customer, hey, Tom, how many heads of broccoli do you eat in a month? Would you like five? They'll just mine that data out of your purchasing history. Then that's more accurate anyway than asking. Yeah, that's a really good point is they'll have a better supply chain management. Although, I mean, they have that now. It's just adding the Amazon magic to the Whole Foods system, right? Yeah, waiting for Amazon farms. Wait until Amazon starts buying farms. You'd like to name another target. A non-retail target. And name the industry. They can call it the Amazon forest for lumber, right? And then they get up, oh, that's crazy. You're just trying to Amazon. I mean, I think the big question, and to answer some of that, why wouldn't Amazon go into the Costco Sam's Club, BJ's route, is I have a lot of questions on whether or not that those are gonna exist in 10 years. Because the premise of Sam's Club Costco BJ's is unless you are in remote areas where things are hard to get to, and even then the idea of buying in bulk is you save money by buying a lot now, right? But if you can save money by ordering it online and having it delivered to you at around the same price, then what again is the value add of going to paying a membership and going to a place that is super jam-packed and only takes cash and has all these restrictions on it? I mean, the samples, and I love Costco, but I don't know if that's something that sticks around in an era where delivery continues to get faster and cheaper. I'll be honest, I haven't been to Costco since we moved to LA. I go to the LA Costco. I go to the LA Costco every other week. Well, part of that is because you have a child, so there are certain things that you just need a lot of. Paper products. Yeah, but I've found that the money I save is not worth the trouble I have to take to store it. And that could be because there's just the two of us. So I don't know, but we used to go. We used to go to Costco all the time and it just ended up just not being worth it. It's definitely a family-size thing, but like paper products, and then there's certain things like bread that I can buy a bulk and throw in the freezer and it's pretty good. It lasts for a couple of months than any problems. Like I don't buy food generally, unless it's a dry good. I try to buy a lot of fresh food and that's something that Costco isn't as good at either. I mean, they got great fresh food. Yeah, you can go there and pick up some bombast steaks and chops and- Oh, sure. I don't need to buy 15 at once though. Exactly. It's like you need a big house. You need a gigantic meat freezer. There's a lot to that have. I mean, the thing to understand with Costco is a majority of their business is still B2B, like they sell a restaurant. Like my dad goes there to buy- Well, okay. That's something I hadn't even thought of yet. What happens when Amazon gets into that end? B2B food delivery. Starts selling to restaurants. Like is that an anti-challenge? Just waiting to happen or no? I mean, Amazon already has a corporate version of Amazon.com. I was a member of it for a while. Didn't make sense for my company, but if you're a bigger company like a restaurant, and when I say bigger, I mean bigger than me and Roger, you probably have an Amazon account like that and they start pushing like, hey, here's some bulk mustard and ketchup and supplies. I don't know. I don't know that it fits into what Whole Foods brings them, but it certainly is a rising tide situation. That would be, oh God, what's that company? Like ICS or something like that? There's a food- Oh, there's Cisco. Cisco, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There used to be two separate companies that Cisco bought out Major Hoskins. I remember that happened. My dad got really upset. It's like, ah, now I gotta buy everything from this one guy. So G-Bag makes a very good point that the reason why people would wanna go to Costco and not deal with deliveries is because sometimes people don't want or can't deal with shipping specifically in cities and that sometimes having something shipped to your home is a pain if you can't meet the delivery person. All I would say is number one, you wanna know what else people don't like to do in big cities, drive. And that's something that you have to do. That's a big part of me not wanting to go to Costco too is like, I have to drive over there. It's not even that far, but parking is a mess. You know what? I will say one area that Costco I prefer is actually buying big screen TVs because they have an incredibly lenient return policy. And you just pick the one you want. I mean, yeah, some people on delivery, but no, I'd rather just drive it myself. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to come off as a Costco hater. Costco helped our wedding quite a bit because of their lenient liquor return policy. We were able to fund our own bar and leverage out the bottles we weren't sure we needed. And listen, I love, love, love Costco. One of my favorite things is, memories is every Friday, me and Andrew Mayne used to go to the Costco in Margate, Florida and get what we used to call Bobo Tapas, which was just go all those Friday samples, baby. Having a great day. We made friends with all the sample ladies. We were living high on the hog. It was fantastic. Fill that, top that off with a $2 hot dog. You are living the dream. But I have questions about the model, I guess. If you look at where the trends are going, less people want to drive, kids don't want to drive. The way that kids are definitely different when they are raised with the internet, kids that were raised in a post-Uber world, let alone a self-driving car world, if we see that come to fruition, are going to be fundamentally different with how they move around. I think that could be an issue. I don't think it will happen as quickly as that. I think it's gonna take maybe 20, 25 years before that actually happens. I think there's, I mean, this goes back to our earlier discussion previous this week about like steam and electricity. I think there's just a lot of legacy things that people are just very accustomed to in business that will be slow to give up. Now newer businesses might do that. It's like, well, we don't need to deal with an office max or a Costco. Just go with Amazon and their business-to-business sales and stuff. It'll be easy first, but for a lot of older businesses, I mean, it's, my dad still trucks out to buy like a case of, you know, a giant case of lettuce or potatoes from the local cash-in carriers. Sure. And there's nothing to say that Costco can't make moves and continue to say relevant. They seem like a very profitable company. They're not, they are still expanding. They are still expanding. 150%. And I'm not, I don't wanna be one of those guys who's like, Microsoft is dying, right? It's like, I'm not there. All I'm saying is that is a high volume by necessity business. Yeah. Do you know what the secret of Costco is? It's the same secret of Amazon Prime. They don't really make their money on the stuff they sell. They make it on memberships. Yeah. That is where they make the money. They've even said as much, just like, listen, a majority of our income comes from membership sales. Yeah, because people pay the membership the one time they go in, but they don't shop enough to save the amount. But I mean, it's like, what, 50 bucks? And they get enough people to do that, to pay, to cover. Well, yeah. It's the subscription model. Totally. Exactly. Hey, thanks everybody for watching or listening. We shall be back tomorrow with another fine day of tech news with Shannon and Len. We'll see you then. Boom.